Labrador Read online

  “Don’t worry,” the Nurse-of-Becoming said, “I’ve got a whole pot full of this stuff. Don’t you worry, dearest beloved, there’s more where that came from.”

  For the first time I noticed her forearms: muscular and hairy, like a sailor’s. I noticed them and I began to scream. That’s why I was screaming—screaming and screaming—when Mama and Daddy ran into the room. That is why I was shielding your body with my body. But I wasn’t protecting you, Willie. I thought that my days of protecting you were over.

  The morning was clear. I remember that: how the light seemed to have been diluted to unbearable thinness and clarity; how it seemed to have its source in something farther away than the sun, so that the sun was just one more object illuminated by it. By the time I finally came downstairs, the kitchen was empty, littered with the signs of earlier, purposeful activity. The smell of coffee lingered, mixed with the smell of toast; steam chuffed out of the cast-iron kettle on the wood stove and, on the table, I saw the burnt stems of several wooden matches, arranged by someone—ironically?—in the shape of a simple house such as a child might draw. Where was everyone? I stood still, listening, holding my glasses in place with one hand, as if greater accuracy of vision might help me hear better. But the house was unnaturally quiet. If there were people in it, they were hiding, holding their breath, trying not to laugh.

  I scrambled myself an egg, put on my parka, and went out to sit on the porch. I wanted to think things over. The egg was cooked perfectly, just the way I liked it: dry and rubbery. With each bite I imagined the new weight it added to my body. Every little bit, I thought, would be important, if I was going to be able to win the fight about the baby. It had taken me a while, Willie, but eventually it had sunk in—I realized that your own plans did not include motherhood. I kept thinking about a play I’d been in in third grade: a play about the Pilgrims, about lives so innocent that, remembering them, it took my breath away. What a hoax! “Fear not, love,” I had recited, cradling the Tiny Tears doll that was my child, as the stage floor presumably tilted up and down beneath us, caught in the large swells of a storm. “Fear not, the strong winds will help us. They will fill the great white sails that carry our ship along.”

  Where was Rogni? Why had he come to peek at me through the meshes of my dream, if not to tell me something? My brain rose up on a string out of the top of my head. Was there a normal world just a hairsbreadth to the left or the right of the one I was in, where a normal Kathleen sat on a porch glider, chewing? I thought that that Kathleen must be a clear thinker, a girl of wonderful substance and insight. If I moved a little, could I make the two Kathleens overlap? I tried but, if anything, I felt lighter, dizzier. There was a layer of snow covering the meadow, and I could see, off to one side, hints of Mama’s garden: tomato stakes twined around with black, wiry vines; two Hubbard squashes, burst and pearly, at the foot of the bean poles.

  A blue Rambler pulled up in the driveway and lurched to a stop by the back door, sending forth a spray of gravel. The impression was incongruent and romantic, as if a galloping horse had been suddenly reined in—from the driver’s side my heart sank to see pop out the fat body of Mrs. McGuire’s nephew. He saluted me briefly, and then floated, with surprising grace, around the car, to open the door for his aunt. She emerged, feet first, her shoes protected from the snow by transparent rain boots, her skinny legs encased in long johns gray from many washings. Wobbling, she clamped on to her nephew’s arm, adjusting with her free hand the placement of some undergarment, the image of which I did not want to entertain.

  “I will be ready to leave at four o’clock, Patrick,” she said. “If it is not too great an inconvenience, I would appreciate it if, for once, you could be on time.” Then she looked up and saw me. “Kathleen! My darling girl! Ah, your poor mama and daddy have been beside themselves with grief.” Picking up speed, as if the mere sight of me had caused to surge through her crisp bones fresh new marrow, she approached. “I have done what I could, my precious,” she said significantly, crossing herself. “The blessed Virgin and her own sweet Son have been with you, night and day, even while the Evil One filled your mortal soul with foul longings.”

  As she folded me in her swift pincers I could hear her intestines whining, a protracted squeal as she broke wind. “Hello, Mrs. McGuire,” I said, pulling back.

  “Ah,” she said, “of course. I am forgetting how long it takes for the evil to work its way out. My slightest touch is like fire, is it not, Kathleen? We must be patient. We must search the house from top to bottom, my darling, for if I’m not mistaken, there will be a darning needle working its way through the feathers of a mattress. There is no end to the trickery!”

  This torture might have gone on indefinitely, had not the kitchen door swung open, revealing Mama, a rolling pin in her hand, a hand-shaped print of flour on her baggy chino trousers. Was it possible that she was wearing Daddy’s pants? “Thank heavens,” she said. “I’ve got a house full of people and Nick is down with some bug.”

  Sure, I thought. Some bug.

  Mrs. McGuire hefted the straw beach bag in which she carried the smaller tools of her trade—a genuine chamois cloth, a can of Pledge, the skull of a snapping turtle, a Bible—and walked into the house. “It was a full moon last night, Mrs. Mowbrey,” I heard her saying, “but I shall see what I can do.”

  The kitchen had become, as if in the twinkling of an eye, a populous place. The Mountie stood in the center of the room, his arm raised and bent, a quarter balanced just below the elbow joint. “Steady, steady,” he was saying, and then he jerked his whole arm forward, catching the coin as it swooped through the air, neatly, in his hand. I could see how he blushed with pleasure at his accomplishment, casting glances in your direction, hoping against hope for some sign of admiration.

  You sat impassive in your sea-green sweater and blue jeans, with your feet looped back around the legs of the chair, your cheek resting in the palm of one hand. “Bravo,” you said, rolling your eyes, “bravo.”

  “It’s not so hard,” the Mountie said. He sat down at the table beside you, crossing an ankle over a knee. “All it takes is a little practice. Here, let me show you.” Then he made the mistake of reaching out for your arm—for a moment I thought you were going to punch him right in the middle of his wide, thick lips.

  “I’ll stick with dancing,” you said. Slyly you looked at me, grinning. “There’s always a thicket of men,” you said, “slowing things down. Know what I mean?”

  The Mountie’s cheeks were so pink that they appeared to have been rouged indiscriminately, like the cheeks of vain old women. He rooted around in his pants pocket, finally locating the keys to the rented car. “Well,” he said, “it’s been a pleasure meeting all of you, but I guess I’d better get going if I’m going to catch that afternoon flight to Goose.”

  Mama turned from the counter where she’d been valiantly trying to assemble, out of rags and tatters of dough, something akin to a pastry shell. “Are you sure I can’t persuade you to stay?” She held up an apple, in a sad imitation of flirtatious behavior. “I’ve never known a man who could resist a nice piece of apple pie.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting about Dad?” you asked.

  “It’s a tempting invitation, Mrs. Mowbrey,” the Mountie said, “but I’m going to have to say no.” He stood up, dangling the keys—I could tell he was trying to get your attention. “There’s a low-pressure system moving in. Your sister, here, can tell you what that means.” Awkwardly he began moving his feet, but he went nowhere, like a band member getting ready to march. “I know what you’re going through. I remember what it was like after my wife’s father died. A family needs time alone. Of course, they were very close. Very close.”

  “It’s not an easy time for any of us,” Mama said solemnly. “He was a good man.”

  “Oh, come on,” you moaned.

  Mama went over and took the Mountie’s hand. “I just want to thank you,” she said, “for all you’ve done. If it hadn’t been for y
ou, I wouldn’t have my little girl back, safe and sound.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  Somehow, inch by inch, he had made his way to the door. I summoned up my courage, opening my mouth to see whether the sentence I’d been mulling around would, at last, emerge. “Do you think,” I said, “if you see Jobie, you could tell him Kathleen sends her love?”

  “Aha,” you said, “Jobie. I was right.”

  The Mountie gave the thumbs-up sign, smirking in your direction. “Far be it from me,” he said, “to stand in the way of romance.” But I guessed, even as he said it, that he was lying. I knew that he never talked to Jobie, except to warn him about the consequences of trapping out of season.

  I can’t actually remember the moment when the door closed behind him. What I can remember is how the bright winter sun turned the car into a thing hard to watch: formless and plutonic, it vanished down the driveway and, with it, the last difficult evidence of Labrador. We all watched it go. I could tell that all of us—even you, Willie—were nervous, wondering what would happen next.

  “So,” you said, “who’s this Jobie?”

  “Someone,” I said. I could hear the dripping of ice from the eaves, that sweet music by which winter tempts us into thinking spring is coming, when it is months away. “I’m going out,” I said, pulling on my parka.

  “Kitty has a boyfriend,” you said to Mama. “How about that? Now’s the time for some of that motherly advice. You know, the kind you gave me. Just because it didn’t work on me is no reason to stop trying.”

  “Willie, please.”

  My hands, in red mittens, looked just like two hearts. “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I said, glancing around the room. “Has anyone seen my binoculars?”

  “Why don’t you ask Mrs. McGuire? Maybe she’s dipped them in blood, or thrown them down the well.” You grinned and swallowed the last of your milk. “Around this place, anything’s possible.”

  “Be careful, sweetheart,” Mama said, and I heard you laugh.

  “Well, except for that,” you muttered.

  I walked with a great sense of purpose—at least insofar as my legs were concerned—towards the lake. Out of the snow, on either side of the road, dead asters proffered their slender bracts of fluff. This was the precise stretch of road where, a long time ago, you’d told me the story of Christopher Columbus. “This road looks flat,” you’d said, “but it isn’t.” I remembered how you’d described Columbus, a handsome man holding up an egg, confronting the court of Queen Isabella. “A lot of them laughed,” you’d said, “but not the Queen. Which is a lucky thing for us.”

  It occurred to me now that maybe the people who’d laughed had been grown-up people with children—people who wanted nothing more than to protect their children from finding themselves, one day, poised in boats on the edge of the world, where everything stopped to be replaced with air.

  The trees loomed up on either side as the road began to descend slightly, a neck dipping down to drink. In Labrador, I thought, I was the one who loomed above the trees: the birch trees there were no taller than my fingers, and their leaves were the size and shape of my baby fingernails. Here the trunks of the trees gave off heat, so that where each one of them disappeared into the snow there was a circular declivity, a place a person could reach into to draw out a handful of damp needles. I saw that a deer had been walking around, leaving the prints of its hooves, shaped like your lip prints on tissue. For a deer, I guessed, there was no obsession greater than hunger. I didn’t think that they desired us—even when their eyes widened as if in recognition—to find their bodies beautiful. I walked lightly, on the tips of my toes. The sun was getting smaller and the day more cold, releasing spirits out of bottles; winds swarmed through the high-up branches of the trees, disturbing the regular pattern of shadows across the road. I could hear the soft tearing loose and dull fall of dead-wood, deep in the forest, followed by random crepitations, and then, just for a second, apprehensive silence.

  The forest opened its mouth, Willie. It opened its mouth and I walked in among the columns of the trees, the dark grooves in their bark extruding ice and the sorry, predictive smell of pencil shavings. Huge and motionless, they consigned all hints of agitation to their twirling green heads, as I made my slow way through the knee-high snow. Ahead of me I could see the lake, scarves of snow lifting and lowering across its frozen surface, revealing patches of black.

  Now I was walking down the glassy tunnel of shrubbery that led from the forest to the dock. Pebbles were visible here, and smooth small rocks, the ones on which, in the summertime, you could stub your toes. But this was January: faint shells of ice encased them, and they crackled under my feet. The closer I got to the lake, the grayer the world became: a single, round cloud had flown over the sun. I could see, when I finally came out into the open, that there were more clouds to the west—larger, darker—and I thought, It’s going to snow.

  I sat down on the dock, reached into the pocket of my parka, and pulled out the Mars bar I’d been saving for this precise moment. The chocolate smelled wonderful. In fact, it smelled so wonderful that the taste was a disappointment, infected, as it was, with the flavor of paper and cardboard. I was sick and tired of being disappointed, Willie. I heaved the thing away from me and then watched as the first flakes of snow began to cover it up. When I couldn’t see it anymore I felt better.

  Far out, probably at the lake’s center, where the raft would be once the summer people arrived, I thought I could make out a more concentrated and substantial form than that assumed by the falling snow. A man? From time to time the wind quieted, and I could see that it was, indeed, the figure of a man, seated on a drum-shaped object. I pulled up the hood of my parka and began to walk out onto the ice towards him, listening all the while for the sound of cracking below me—the sound that, by the time you could hear it, would no longer be a warning but the danger itself, spreading out under your feet. I walked faster and faster because, even before I could see the face, the great blue eyes and the slightly parted lips, I knew who it was. I passed seven tip-ups, their red flags dipped, meaning the fish had not yet taken the bait. I was running. I was running and, as I did, the flakes of snow got larger and larger, each flake original and distinct, testifying to the existence of a mind haunted by dreams of geometric precision.

  Rogni was sitting on an upturned five-gallon bucket, jigging for perch. Around his feet there must have been forty or fifty of the things, their little golden bodies frozen solid, like the spilled currency of giants. Several of them, I noticed, had had the eyeballs plucked from their sockets, but this didn’t upset me. I knew, from the boys in my class who went ice fishing, that the best bait for perch was the eyes of perch. “Tasty,” Bobby Hallenbach had said, pretending to pop one in his mouth, whereupon the sissies among us had squealed.

  “Kathleen,” Rogni said. “At last.” A line disappeared from his hand down a hole in the ice.

  “What do you mean, ‘at last’? You make it sound like all you’ve been doing is waiting around for me. Just waiting until I showed up. I don’t understand. Maybe I’m awfully dumb, but I thought you were supposed to stay away from Willie. Wasn’t that what you said?”

  “You’re right, Kathleen.” He looked weary and, from time to time, it was almost as if I could see through his face, back to the shore where the cedars and willows gathered, where the dock stuck out like a tongue. “You’re shivering,” he said, and then he lifted a heavy black blanket from the ice and handed it to me. “Wrap yourself up in this.”

  “Hey,” I said, “where did you get this?” It was the antique carriage robe that I remembered seeing in the barn, hanging over the wall of the box stall where your pony used to live. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “Why do you keep taking our things? If you’re an angel, why do you need to take our things? I really don’t understand.”

  I could see, rising to the surface of his body, a luminousness, the whole image sharpening into the points of a constellation I
didn’t know: northern, unmapped, an X. “I’m sorry, Kathleen,” he said. “No matter how hard I might try, I could never make a blanket. Or a ring. Or a creature of flesh and blood. At least, not out of thin air. What I can do is arrange things into stories. And that’s all.”

  “You can make a baby,” I said. “Don’t think I don’t know about that.”

  Rogni bent his face close to mine and I could see the unmarked contours of his skin; a wave of heat broke from him then, scorching the tips of my eyelashes, even though they were protected by my glasses. “Remember,” he said, “this is your image I’ve been created in. Prissiness doesn’t become you, Kathleen. Believe me, I understand—better than I’d like to—what an unreliable thing a human body is. If it’s taken me this long to get the story right, then it’s your fault as well.”

  “No! You have help,” I said.

  “God has nothing to do with this,” Rogni said. “I thought you knew that.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said.

  Which wasn’t the truth. The truth was, I knew everything. I knew everything, Willie.

  From the cusped blades of Rogni’s shoulders feathers shot forth—the network of veins extending outward, beating against the cold walls of air. And then, at the very end of the row of tip-ups, a flag leaped, and from somewhere within the wide frozen world I thought I heard a scream.

  “There was once,” Rogni said, “a childless couple, well advanced in years, living together in a cottage on the edge of a great woods. This was in the second half of the twentieth century, when the men who ruled the world had lost sight of the dangerous connection between power and artifice. So, even though the woods in which this couple lived were no longer prowled by saber-toothed tigers, their lives were constantly in peril.

  “Were they aware of this fact? They owned neither a radio nor a television set; they were sufficient unto themselves in the manner of the once-well-to-do, hiding all evidence of their decline from everyone but each other, where it took a form resembling their original passion: oblique and carnal. The old man, for example, bathed rarely; his wife let her gray hair grow long, and wore it unbound. Thus, even after they’d acquired the habit of sleeping in separate beds, strands of the woman’s hair would detach from her scalp to drift across the man’s face; the air she breathed would be thick with the smell of his body. Eros, once admitted through your door, will never leave. It is up to you whether you will make of this a good or a bad thing. It is up to you whether you choose to use Eros as a weapon.